Brian Johnson

Episode 54: Our Thermostats Are Set Too Low

“Each of us has an inner
thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and
creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner
thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves,
causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel
secure...

Unfortunately, our thermostat setting usually gets
programmed in early childhood, before we can think for ourselves.
Once programmed, our Upper Limit thermostat setting holds us back
from enjoying all the love, financial abundance, and creativity
that’s rightfully ours. It keeps us in our Zone of Competence or at
best our Zone of Excellence. It prevents us from living in the
ultimate destination of the journey—our Zone of Genius.” ~
Gay Hendricks from The
Big Leap

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Transcript

Our Thermostats Are Set Too Low

“Each of us has an inner
thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and
creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner
thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves,
causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel
secure...

Unfortunately, our thermostat setting usually gets
programmed in early childhood, before we can think for ourselves.
Once programmed, our Upper Limit thermostat setting holds us back
from enjoying all the love, financial abundance, and creativity
that’s rightfully ours. It keeps us in our Zone of Competence or at
best our Zone of Excellence. It prevents us from living in the
ultimate destination of the journey—our Zone of Genius.” ~
Gay Hendricks from The
Big Leap

The coolest way to imagine our Upper Limits we need to Leap
beyond: Think of it like a thermostat. If you have a thermostat in
your house set to 60 degrees, the moment your house starts to get a
little warmer--creeping up to 62, 64 degrees, what happens? The air
conditioner kicks in and brings the temperature back to a chilly 60,
yah?

Same thing with the level of happiness, love, financial abundance,
success, and creativity we experience in our lives. If our
thermostats are set low, we’re gonna constantly sabotage ourselves
as we bump up against our Upper Limits. Psychologists call this our
“Happiness Set Point” and a we talk about this idea in a couple
other Notes.

In her great book Happy for No Reason (see Notes),
Marci Shimoff says: “Researchers have found that no matter what
happens to you in life, you tend to return to a fixed range of
happiness. Like your weight set-point, which keeps the scale hovering
around the same number, your happiness set-point will remain the same
unless you make a concerted effort to change it.”
... “In fact, there was a famous study conducted that tracked
people who’d won the lottery--what many people think of as the
ticket to the magic kingdom of joy. Within a year, these lucky
winners returned to approximately the same level of happiness they’d
experienced before their windfall. Surprisingly, the same was true
for people who became paraplegic. Within a year or so of being
disabled, they also returned to their original happiness level.”

So, we have a thermostat that’ll Upper Limit us we expand. Good
news is we can learn to become more and more aware of the behaviors
we’ve adopted that sabotage us when we’re “heating” up more
than our set point is comfie with.

The book is ALL about making the BIG LEAP *beyond* these
unnecessarily low set points into a state of ever expanding success,
love, and abundance. (And, if this is resonating with you, I *highly*
recommend you get it and rock out with your journal as you discover
the behaviors you’re employing to cool yourself off.)